E-commerce or e-business solutions may allow an individual to perform financial transactions over the Internet through a secure website. This type of service enables customers to do their banking or financial transaction processing from anywhere where Internet access is available. In many cases, a web browser is utilized and any normal Internet connection is suitable.
In recent years, consumers have drastically reduced the use of cash payment for goods and services and have more frequently relied on credit cards, debit cards, stored value cards, or electronic transfer of funds associated with a financial account to facilitate financial transactions. Financial institutions have begun offering businesses a credit card account that offers account holders the option of shifting invoice-based check spending to a business credit card. For example, business credit cards designed for contractors have the objective of inducing them to do away with invoice-based payments by check and shift to more frequent use of their business credit cards.
Customers, including individuals, contractors, and other businesses frequently make purchases or issue disbursements for multiple projects, clients, or customers in a single financial transaction. For example, when a contractor uses an open-loop credit card to make a single purchase of multiple items for a variety of projects, an electronic billing application generally allows the contractor to view only limited data regarding the transaction (e.g., the date, the name of the vendor, and the total dollar amount charged to the credit card) and to electronically settle payment. A solution has developed as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,949,579, hereby incorporated by reference, that allows a contractor (or other business or individual) to allocate a percentage or dollar amount of the total dollar amount charged to the credit card at a point of sale to a particular project, job, or client matter. As a result, the contractor may need to collect and examine numerous receipts to properly charge clients for items purchased for a particular project.
While U.S. Pat. No. 7,949,579 discloses a system that allows customers to view and allocate data, it does not fully address data capture, storage, transmission, analysis, and display. Credit card networks define III levels of data (Levels I, II, and III) that can be associated with a transaction by a merchant. Level I data is typically provided by merchants for all transactions and includes merchant name, location, transaction amount, merchant category code, and transaction date. Level II data provides additional details such as sales tax amount, and customer account codes. Level III data provides line-item details such as product quantities, product codes, product descriptions, delivery zip codes, freight amount, duty amount, and other applicable data.
Currently, the majority of merchants only provide Level I data to their acquiring banks. The small percentage of merchants that do provide Level II or III data are those with high corporate spending (e.g., hotels, airlines), or fleet card purchases (e.g., gas stations). Transmitting Level III data requires sophisticated merchant point-of sale (POS) system. There is no incentive for merchants to send Level III data unless the merchant has a significant number of large dollar transactions on eligible cards or a large number of eligible transactions.
Merchants having an appropriate mix of eligible transactions and cards processed have already deployed Level III POS systems (traditionally merchants that process travel transactions and commercial/purchasing cards). However, this is a small percentage of merchants.
Currently existing credit card processing systems make it difficult for merchants to transmit Level III data. In the authorization data stream are fields or attributes of data, one of which is bit 63 that contains item level data. Typically, when a customer initiates a card transaction, authorization comes within seconds, but additional data in the stream creates latency. To provide incentive for merchants to supply the data despite the latency, the associations are offering merchants reductions in interchange rates and incentives to give level III data.
However, acquiring banks charge the merchants if the merchants even include one line of data to the association. The charge is currently a per line item fee. The acquiring bank charges negate the fact that the association offers incentives for providing the data.
A recently proposed solution for capturing additional data includes receipt capture from the consumer side. Consumers can use various techniques to capture data on receipts. Consumer capture techniques may involve image capture, for example, with a mobile device. While image capture may be a relatively simple process for standard sized receipts, it can present difficulties with longer receipts. Multiple steps may be required to capture longer receipts and if care is not taken, parts of the receipt may be missing. Furthermore, there is typically little value when the data is provided simply as an image. In order to provide additional value, consumers would have to allow their email or data storage to be mined or filtered in order to provide value.
Accordingly, a solution is needed for collecting receipt data and storing it in association with a particular transaction. The collection of data should minimize expense to both merchants and customers. The solution should extract value from the collected data to create new products, services, behavior analysis, better targeting, better retailer spend analysis. Data including POS data, vendor product information, industry data reviews, and warranties should ideally be integrated in a useful manner with purchase data.
Furthermore, the use of paper receipts has increasingly come into question. Large retailers spend millions of dollars a year, just on paper for creating receipts. The expense and waste associated with paper receipts cannot be overstated. Bottom line costs and environmental impact could be reduced by eliminating paper receipts.
Accordingly, a solution is needed that allows for the transmission and analysis of valuable point of purchase data without the use of paper receipts.